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the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
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I was far away from the computer all weekend. In spirit, if not in actual proximity. LT and I moved furniture, getting really sweaty and tired in the process, and started turning our "spare room" into the new "study." It's much bigger than the tiny back bedroom, which means that I can get my own desk, and set up my own computer, instead of hanging around like an orphan asking LT if I can check my e-mail. You already know that I have a strained relationship with Sleep. But did you know that I am barely acquainted with Pie? It's true. I did not eat pie until college. My mom never made pie, I never had pie at anyone's house, and I didn't order pie in restaurants because it was all so new to me. And it goes without saying that I had never made a pie. Until now! Friday night S. came over and we made pie all night long. Literally. Not a euphemism. We made an apple pie and a blueberry pie. We drank three bottles of wine while we made the pie, became severely alarmed by the color and consistency of Crisco,* discovered the sensual properties of raw egg yolk on the fingers, and chopped a hell of a lot of apples. Next time we get a prep cook. Preferably an androgynous teenage boy prep cook, slightly glammed up in an apron and eyeliner and nothing else.) (*Bizarre geological discovery nicknamed "crisco" or "moonmilk." Neat!) Anyway. I am glad that I have finally had homemade pie, instead of bad college cafeteria pie. The desserts in my college cafeteria were dreadful. One particular yellow cake with sprinkles can still cause a little facial spasm when I think about it. Although this terrible cake did inspire a death-metal song called "Nastycake," which my friend Martin and I performed at an open-mic session (me on deep growly distorted Cookie-Monster vocals, him making ungodly guitar noises), much to the chagrin of the drama snobs, who seemed to misunderstand the "open mic" concept and thought that the whole thing was their own personal little forum for un-funny improv and dramatic monologues about vaginas. NASTYCAKE! IT IS VERY BAD NARRATIVE FORM TO DO WHAT I'M ABOUT TO DO Because I don't think of this online Thing as a continuous saga, but rather a series of flashbulb individual pages, I am reluctant to revisit things I have already discussed, but! I forgot to tell you something else funny about my "conversation" with Illuminati Guy. At one point (oh, let's say at around Beer Number Three), he started in on this spiel about how money is evil. Now if you ask me, money, at least in the abstract, is neutral. It is society's attitudes toward money, and the use of money as something other than an nonemotionally-invested medium of exchange, that starts to become problematic. Illuminati Guy, in making his garbled points, tried to say that "money has only been in use for 200 years" and that before that we all lived in happy harmony using the barter system. I was taking a swig at that point and came very close to doing a classic comedy spit take. 200 years? Excuse me? Have you never been to a museum? The Greeks, the Babylonians, the Chinese, even Bronze Age people all used coins, and not strictly as a measure of the worth of their metal, either. Money is an old concept. Eventually he conceded the FACTS, but still maintained that money was evil, and also, as a side note, admitted to owning a bong shaped like one of those Grateful Dead skulls, and did he seriously think I could refrain from mocking that? The end. No more Illuminati Guy in these pages, I promise. MAN I AM BORING TODAY Is language limiting or is it all we have? On really bad days I think about little kids learning to speak, learning to put labels on everything. At first, when you are small, things like the sky, light, and trees are so wide, so liquid, so limitless, so new to you, so directly experienced, and then you learn the words sky or light or tree and click, just like that, the liquid is curdled and the word is forever what you know and there's a brand-new box around what you see. And then the box gets filled up with associations, and the thing becomes the word the way the memory becomes the photograph. Of course there's no real alternative, and being a language freak and a teeny bit Wittgensteinian I really don't mind so much, but remember, we are talking about how I feel on bad days. Sometimes words feel like a pocketful of rocks or crawl pointlessly across the page and I think: Why do I even bother to try and talk to people? Why do I bother to communicate anything? Why can't we just be like animals and, I don't know, PEE everywhere as a means of communication? Because this word thing is totally hopeless. But most of the time, of course, I am happy about words, and they feel as big and wide to me as anything. There are certain words that I love so much that I want to put them in my mouth. On the bus today though I revived my childhood fantasy that every thing---not just every category of thing, that we in our ignorance have so clumsily lumped together, but every thing---every car, every bird, every clock, every tree, every brick in a house, every drop of water in the ocean---has a secret, true name all its own. If you knew all those names you would have no need to ever speak again. Have you seen the happyface spiders? And three cheers for Margaret Knight, without whom you'd have a hell of a time getting your groceries home. ---mimi smartypants is not secretly Canadian. back/forward |
